skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin was supposed to be private and secure, so it more or less failed its mission. It is only presently easier to trade because of various gimmicks to warm people up to the idea of accepting it. Gold on the other hand has a long history of being a currency. Everyone in the world knows it is valuable, even if they don't know how much. The fact Bitcoin wildly swings around in value and requires special computer access and sometimes hardware makes it harder to transact with. If you don't care about privacy and security, and want ease of use, you would be far better served by a credit card than a Bitcoin wallet. And if you do care about those three things, gold is better. The only thing I can say positive about Bitcoin is that it is easier to carry across borders than gold. That plus the modicum of privacy it offers might make it ok for some. As for me, I don't think I could privately accumulate enough Bitcoin for that to be a real benefit to me.

Edit: I hit the limit for now so here's a reply:

>Was it supposed to be [private]? A currency with a complete ledger of transactions available for view by anyone in the p2p network is hardly secure by design

It was intended to be secure and private. That is, people can't steal your Bitcoin (theoretically) and the public ledger gives you some potential strategy if you did want to establish a reputation while dealing with anonymous people. Someone could also deal with you without ever knowing your identity, which makes it private. It would be fairly hard to identify Bitcoin users if their wallets were never linked to their identities, e.g. through an exchange. I don't know how other cryptocurrencies do their ledgers but I assume you are limited to querying the network about specific transactions instead of having access to it all. It could be done by having public yet encrypted transaction records as well maybe. Idk, cryptocurrency never appealed to me. I remember thinking my classmates were insane for buying Bitcoin at $70. The price movement we've seen feels like some insiders using it to embezzle money from reputable institutions who have been sold on the hype. We're in real trouble if the government starts buying it. We will be robbed blind.
Time is nature's forth dimension, so I think considering the various stages of a slice moving through a four dimensional object at once counts as a visualization.
> But some archaeologists say it's hard to imagine that humans would repeatedly traverse a site and leave no stone tools.

Those tools were really valuable. They busted their butts, making them, and wouldn't want to toss them aside, just because they got chipped or cracked. They are much more likely to throw them into a "spare parts bag," and keep them around.

Today's throwaway culture is actually pretty new, in human history. Just hang around some poor folks, to see radical conservation, in action.
Join us!! It’s the perfect hobby for nerds. It starts with big DIY projects with lots of PVC and zip ties and 3d printing. Then you do a bunch of small electronics with solder and microcontrollers. And then you get to do programming and some basic networking to set it all up.

I got started in Dec 2020 when I couldn’t go anywhere and my show grows every year.

I’ll admit it is a time sink. I’ve probably spent 120+ hours on it (and my wife has contributed 20ish hours as well)
It's bird though, not bug.
Google also made Dart which is better than Js in every regard.
I don't use Snap on my Ubuntu Desktop systems because I don't like apps secretly updating without my awareness and also for the immense amount of additional disk space used by Snap.

Having said that, no, I don't see any usage of immutable Linux in my future.
It’s mentioned in the article, there’s case law.
Why? You can easily remove them if they’re accidentally added.
Releasing stuff.
For C++ projects I use a language server to jump around within Emacs. For a Linux kernel which is my day job, I just use git grep, since I couldn't make the language server work across multiple architectures at the same time and plain old C is simple enough for that. I have never used auto completion, so perhaps I don't know what I am missing. At least to me, coming up with an idea how to do stuff is more time-consuming than writing it down in an editor.
As I said, I'd rather not start a flame war ;)
RCMP: Reconstructing RDMA-Based Memory Disaggregation via CXL
Same here! I really underestimated marketing. I've got a lot more respect for it now.

I assumed "build it and they will come" would work, and while there are definitely areas I could improve my product, the bottleneck for me is getting people to see it and try it. Once they're using the trial, I have an excellent conversion rate.
This is the top comment I hope for on every Christmas. Some of us draw snowmen instead of Santas. We all get a day to enjoy in our own way though. Sounds like a great time.
The irony is it isn't for the win(dows)
> But somehow our field has come to not only accept it, but encourage it.

Yes. There were too many cases of overnight success to ignore that in our field, this works very well.
ECAL – Enhanced Communication Abstraction Layer / Pub-Sub Middleware
I actually find jj great for (1). The project I reference working on in this post is in exactly that bucket, and the kinds of things I do with it are not “complicated” but jj is still much, much better than working with Git—not least for the kind of workflow I showed in this post!
Wisdom’s Workshop (2016) by James Axtell is a history of the American research university from Medieval times to the present. It's worth reading for anyone in academia or grad school in the US.

Each year, I put together lists of the books and articles that I found most interesting. Here's my book list for 2024: https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-books-2024/

I'm still cranking out my list of articles.
Learning machine learning through maths and implementing some of the most common ML algorithms from scratch.

Writing technical blogs - I find it easy to write topics where there is no right or wrong, just a perspective. But would like to write some technical stuffs i learnt over the year.
Show HN: Make your RSS feed aggregator using GitHub Actions
To me this highlights that none of my hardware (pc, phone laptop) can actually render anything at native screen resolution and not occasionally drop frames.

Can we please design software to be frame-drop-free? Ie. if it drops a frame, even once, send a bug report to the developer to fix it, and if he cannot, refund me for the hardware?

My analogue TV from 1956 does not drop frames, I can assure you.
FWIW I ended up marrying her. Now we go out of town together. :)
Situation: People are getting fat from choosing to eat too much bacon

"Pitiful, though with a thankfully straightforward cure. We arrest all pig farmers, meat packers and delivery drivers while inspecting all refrigerated cargo at checkpoints. We shall demolish any restaurant serving pork, blame each person who has ever eaten a slice regardless of their health, and demonize every salty and fatty food."

"Yes, my stance is drastic. But once we remove the burden of choice from our citizens, they will be empowered to make new, more valuable decisions with their life. Bacon will never be a problem again."

New situation: People have quit bacon and started smoking cigarettes
Was it supposed to be? A currency with a complete ledger of transactions available for view by anyone in the p2p network is hardly secure by design.

Edit: thanks for the reply. In that sense that you are able to be only identified by a wallet address, that makes sense. I guess I meant that, unlike privacy-focused coins like Monero, there is a way to see who sent what to who (even if who is just an address) and to develop surveillance based on this.
Optimality of Frequency Moment Estimation
The classic AMS (1996) bound for estimating the frequency moments of a stream is shown to be optimal
It’s common for hardware vendors to provide a working system for demonstration purposes so you can evaluate the hardware without having to learn an immutable OS toolkit. Then when you pick hardware you also do the bring up work to get the kernel compiling from source and integrated with your userspace of choice. At that point you’ll switch to an immutable system.

Hardware vendors in this space can’t be trusted, so you need to make sure the board is actually fit for purpose. Outside of the hobbyist space you have to be really careful. There are often business objectives that rely on the board working a certain way.
Just because I might not remember/notice, and I don't want sensitive data to be committed by accident if I put an env var on disk for some reason.
I put The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in that category, a pleasure to read from front to back. The association with work made it take me decades to get to some of the books assigned for class in high school, like these. A few were so good that I tried to read Anna Karenina again. Maybe in a few decades more I'll like that one too.
“lawful intercept” can be mandated to be built into anything
Though poor cables do drop the voltage a bit I feel that the proper approach would be to to just use a weak charger. They are "all" USB-A and there are no lack of USB-A -> C cables.
Pottery/ceramics throwing. I want to learn to make cups and plates. I'm tired of computers. I already know enough to be able to write useful programs and get the job done.
I want to build/finish my second stand up paddleboard from wood (https://sliverpaddleboards.com/). I want this one to stay floating longer than 15 minutes :(
If I was ever given a choice then I'd tell you. And I have done "resolving complex issues beyond the FAQ of a framework" many, MANY times.

Almost as if country and environment have anything to do with it, more than merit.
If blender is a bit overwhelming for you (it was for me), give blockbench a try. I love how simple everything is, and you can always add plugins if you miss something. Its open-source too!
Learn how to use (Neo)vim.
Marketing and sales, like everybody else. :)

Desktop application development. I want to make it as easy and fast to create desktop apps as it is to create a web app or a command line app.
Lithics were, broadly speaking, more akin to how we treat plastics than metal tools. Lithic production results in enough waste that archaeologists give the waste a special name ("debitage") and even use it for destructive testing that would be unthinkable for more significant / less voluminous artifacts.
You could actually use Perl and Python with IE 4 through Windows Script Host if you installed the versions from ActiveState (ActivePerl, ActivePython, and also ActiveTcl), which provided ActiveX scripting engines for those languages. I actually wrote some small Perl browser LAN apps using this for myself. It was a huge security hole in that anyone who install ActivePerl, Python, or Tcl could be rooted if they visited a web page with the appropriate malicious script tag, as these languages provide out-of-the-box support for file manipulation and other potentially dangerous actions.

You could also use the AS distros to write classic, pre-.NET ASP applications. I know of at least one startup that actually did this (ActivePerl + classic ASP + IIS on Windows NT/2000), or at least seemed to based on their job postings.
https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&releas...

Pulp Fiction

Lion King

The Mask

Four Weddings and a Funeral

Dumb and Dumber

The Crow

Speed

True Lies

Interview with the Vampire

Natural Born Killers

Ace Ventura

Stargate

Clerks

The list goes on. Lot's of movies that turned out to be classics or cult classics, or the start of some great careers.
Mental endurance and discipline to better handle tasks that require sustained focus, especially those I instinctively resist or dismiss, whether because I dislike them or I downplay their importance. Examples are thinking through unfamiliar and difficult problems or reading dense documentation and contracts.

I also want to improve my prioritization skills to better judge which challenging tasks truly deserve my time and mental energy, and which ones don't.
thats so extra lol
Yep that was my exact story too, before the first sock gave out shortly before warranty, was replaced (at least regarding customer service im happy), and then same exact story with the second one.

Given that i had a third unrelated dock fail recently it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suspect something on my end might be causing this, but then again that’s the only hardware that failed on me in a while and i don’t do anything that unusual besides having 3x4k screens plugged into it and the occasional mouse charging/flash drive drawing power off it.

In all cases the PSU of the dock died with it (but also the docks themselves) so i suspect current DL chipsets overheat and eventually burn out when pushing clost to their max resolution.
I want to be bigger and fluffier.
If you check `jj status` regularly and/or use `jj split` to build up your commits (like `git add -p`) then you’ll notice. They might end up in your local repo (until a gc) at worst.
Pretty simple to spot LoRa vs LoRA.
Writing blog posts and being ok with them not being perfect.

I often have an idea for a post that would be interesting, but then as a learn more about the topic in order to write, I start to realize how much I don’t know. At this point, the post either dies or I spend way too long learning every irrelevant detail until I feel like I know enough.

So I think the skill I am trying to learn is writing as a non-expert. Learning to write in a tone that makes it ok to not know everything. Writing in a tone that conveys my experience and understanding, but doesn’t try to be an authority on the subject.

Writing is a tough skill!
If you are in the greater Boston area stop by: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBxB1aroSqE.

Lots of animated displays in New England: https://www.nelights.org/
#1 - Aggressor series by FX Holden - Set in the near future with AI, drones, and much more. It is a Tom Clancy-like book about WW3 breaking out over Tawain. Sometimes, I would come out of reading it and be unsure if I was reading the news or a book.

#2 - The Comfort Crisis By Michael Easter – What a fantastic book, I wish they studied this in high school for every single student. I listened to it on audiobook, and it was really well done there, too. The format is fantastic with this big arching story and in-between chapters that nail down each point. The core message is that we are much better humans if we challenge ourselves mentally, emotionally, and physically.

#3 - Wounded Tigris by Leon McCarron - Leon and his small team travel down the entire Tigris River. They start in Turkey, go through all of Iraq, and end in the marshes. I picked it up, thinking it would be an interesting adventure with a heavy dose of history. Instead, I got an utterly fascinating account of the river, its ecosystem, the heavy impact of pollution and water management, and the cultural impact of all these changes on the people who live alongside it. I still think about this book.

And one more on the fiction side here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024/f/bwb

If you want to share your 3 favorite reads of the year, I have a voting setup for the Hacker News Community here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42349605

You can share your 3 favorites and see what everyone else picked here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024/hacker-news-community?referre...

I wanted to create a setup like NPR's Books We Love but for HN and other communities.
My house looks like that photo now too. I love Christmas music too.

In fact my friend's house is featured in the top link on HN right now. He's helped me with my own show.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42494512
Non-technical skills

* (Continue) Dancing - Beginning of 2023, I got into street style dance and movement (including stretching which I've done now for the past 223 days) helped me get through one of the most challenging periods of my life (i.e. divorced with a child, moved from U.S. to London to single raise my daughter). Dance has now taken its life of its own and I'm finding myself competing in dance "battles" as a way to test and grow my mental fortitude.

Technical skills

* UI Design - as a low level (i.e. C developer), I currently lack the skills to make my own little toy web apps more aesthetically pleasing for not just me, but to share with others

* Photography and videography - want to increase my current level(s) since I started a YouTube channel documenting my dance journey and also create little reels for community events

* (maybe) Rust or C++

[0] - Example of dance related YouTube shorts I make: https://youtube.com/shorts/cI2LAe-MMrw
I spent 20 minutes clicking through links and reading descriptions and I still can't tell whether this is for pictures of ghosts or something else.
Nobody else needs to convert to jj for you to use it, so there’s no real downside to switching.
This was also my first thought, but looks like it's already designed to be toolkit-agnostic, like NetSurf. So it should be easy to port to fltk or anything else.

$ ls -1 fixgui_\*.c
fixgui_cocoa.c
fixgui_gtk.c
fixgui_haiku.c
fixgui_win32.c
ScyllaDB license change!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42457680
Can you elaborate more in this? Years ago, I used to primarily do Rails development. Recently I built some web apps that use a JVM backend (one app uses Java & Spring and the other Kotlin & Micronaut) and a React frontend. One thing I ended up really missing issue the the frameworks, especially with disjointed fronted, don't solve the standard issue of a request sending an invalid form entry and showing the validation errors on the form. I ended up building my own implementation of that which of course also requires a convention on message format. Since most apps need to solve this it's so weird to be that frameworks nowadays don't solve this out of the box.
Show HN: We build drones that pick items in e-commerce fulfillment centers
At Hummingbird Systems, we have developed a unique drone based approach to robotic warehouse unit order picking, especially well suited to direct-to-consumer e-commerce fulfillment.

So why use drones? … Fundamentally lower cost.

Hummingbird's drone platform is inherently less expensive than ground robots with pick arms or large gantry style AS/RS systems. The drones allow us to directly position the manipulator on task without all the weight and expense of multi-axis backlash free geared motor assemblies.

Furthermore unlocking the often unused vertical real-estate in e-comm warehouses, the ability to leverage existing bins and racking, and a unique overhead tether power system that eliminates the need for batteries or recharging all contribute to the best ROI of any robotic picking solution on the market.

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions, ideas for new use cases, or investment: http://hbird.tech
Practical AI/ML, and not all the marketing buzz.

Does anyone know of a good “AI/ML for Dummies” … from the basics.

I do not want something that is just teaching me dozens of frameworks or toolkits.
I have to the Aggressor book series by FX Holden. It's set in the near future with AI, drones, and much more. It is a Tom Clancy-like book about WW3 breaking out over Tawain. Sometimes, I would come out of reading it and be unsure if I was reading the news or a book.
I looked at this book several times last year, but I couldn't get past how hard Barnes and Noble were pushing it!
when the defense of a project is that you can turn off the bad features, you aren't really making a chase better than say chrome or anything else.

A product built on trust, shouldn't involve having to go turn off untrustworthy elements.
Peace and comfort to you as well!
For sure, but 'memory' as people think of it plays a fairly small role in chess - mostly relegated to opening preparation which is quite short term - watch any player, including Magnus, stream and they all constantly forget or mix up opening theory in various lines. But of course if you expect to play a e.g. Marshall Gambit in your next game then you'll review those lines shortly before your game.

Instead people think players have this enormous cache of memorized positions in their minds where they know the optimal move, but it's more about lots of ideas and patterns, which then show themselves immediately when you look at a position.

Watch any world class player solve puzzles and you'll find they have often solved it before 'you' (you being any person under master level) have even been able to figure out where all the pieces are. And it's not like they've ever seen the exact position before (at least not usually), but they've developed such an extreme intuition that the position just instantly reveals itself.

So one could call this some sort of memory as I suspect you're doing here with 'lifelong memory', but I think intuition is a far more precise term.
Board games tend to attract young people. I know there can be a few oddballs who make the group technically appear to range from 12 to 80 or something, and like one or two girls who make it technically have women there. But if 90% of the group is 12-25 year old boys and young men, this seems like an inefficient way to meet people you can really hang with as an older guy, and also an extremely inefficient way to get dates. As long as you enjoy it and know what you're getting into I guess it's fine. Sometimes being the old man with a few extra resources can be beneficial. But I'm not looking for more work than I already have.
Ok, you say you are bad at marketing but the Nuenki homepage is one of the best I've seen. The product and benefits are so clearly explained. Well done.

You may eventually want a small project to create a recognizable logo (think how much mileage Duolingo has got from their little owl fellah).

One thing I often see with SaaS offerings is no clear & simple concept / theme that separates the free and paid plans of a service. For Nuenki I would just lean into "works on mobile" being the clear value you get from the paid plan. Hopefully over time you can bring it to more mobile platforms with a small app or something.

Congrats on what you've built and hope to see more growth in 2025! Great idea well executed.
Growing up celebrating Xmas in Canada resulted in me dreading the month before with Xmas music and decorations everywhere. As an adult I love that I can mostly choose not to celebrate (aside from parents and inlaws). Even living in Korea I avoided the celebrations but couldn’t avoid the decorations.

But I do really enjoy one single thing about the holidays: the VLC icon getting a Santa hat a couple of weeks before Dec 25.

VLC has been doing this as long as I can remember (earlier than 2005?) and it’s literally the one thing I look forward to for the holidays.
I started The Brothers Karamazov four times through the years, but would quit each time after 50 pages or so. I finally realized that I was repulsed by the story because the father reminded me of the worst aspects of myself. Once I accepted that I was able to read on and finish the book, and now I look upon it as one of my favorite novels.

I would have given up on it early on, but when I was going to Berkeley in the late 1970s, I attended First Presbyterian Church, where Earl Palmer was pastor. He extolled The Brothers Karamazov, Sheldon Vanauken's book A Severe Mercy, and Star Wars from the pulpit. His favorite part of TBK was the Grand Inquisitor chapter; I had to slog through that, but overall found the book quite rewarding, not least of all because it is a window into the Russian soul, which I think remains to this day a different beast than our own.
I just want to do more math.
Ah, that's not too bad then, thank you!
Is there a separate tank for solid excrement? Are we missing an opportunity for a shit stream?

How is that even released from ISS?
>So much more complicated.

Are you one of those guys[1] who doesn't understand files and folders?

Seriously, the only thing you're exhibiting is your abject ignorance of Windows and possibly computers in general which are not something you should be proud of.

[1]: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/09/27/2032200/students-do...